2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C17

GrantParkMusicFestivalSeventy-seventh Season

Grant Park Orchestra and ChorusCarlos Kalmar, Artistic Director and Principal Conductor

Christopher Bell, Chorus Director

Kwamé RyanWednesday, July 20, 2011 at 6:30 p.m. Jay Pritzker PavilionGRANT PARK ORCHESTRAKwamé Ryan, Guest Conductor

LIEBERMANN Furioso

RAVEL Le Tombeau de Couperin Prélude: Vif Forlane: Allegretto Menuet: Allegro moderato Rigaudon: Assez vif

SCHUMANN Symphony No. 2 in C major, Op. 61 Sostenuto assai — Allegro ma non troppo Scherzo: Allegro vivace Adagio espressivo Allegro molto vivace

2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C19

KwAMé RYAN, born in Toronto of Trinidadian descent and educated in England and Germany, is now in his fourth season as Music Director of the Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine. His work with the orches-tra is attracting increasing international attention, not only as a result of their hugely successful concerts in Bordeaux but also for their appearances throughout Europe (including extensive tours of Spain and Switzerland) and Japan. The Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine under Mr. Ryan’s direction has made recordings for the Mirare label of Schubert’s Symphony No. 9, Rachmaninoff ’s Symphony No. 2 and Beethoven’s Piano Concertos No. 1 and 2 as part of an ongoing cycle with Shani Diluka. Future record-

ing plans include Schumann’s Symphonies No. 2 and 4. Mr. Ryan also records Strauss’ Ariadne auf Naxos this season for BMC. As a result of his successful work in Bordeaux, Kwamé Ryan was invited in 2009 to become Music Director of the Orchestre Français des Jeunes, whose current season includes concerts in Aix-en-Provence, Rennes and Paris. Among his many engagements as a guest conductor are the Musica de Hoy Festival in Madrid, Württembergische Staatsoper Stuttgart, Or-chestre National de Belgique, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart, Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, Sym-phonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Bamberger Symphoniker, Bayerische Staatsorchester and Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen. Kwamé Ryan was General Music Director of Theater Freiburg and the Philharmonisches Orchester Freiburg between 1999 and 2003, having previously been Assistant Conductor of the Staatsoper Stuttgart. He has also conducted Salome for English National Opera, Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au Bucher at the Edinburgh Festival and the world premiere of Pintscher’s L’espace dernier at Opéra National de Paris (Bastille). In December 2010, in recognition of his significant contributions to art and literature, Kwamé Ryan was awarded the title of Officier dans l’ordre des arts et des letters by the French Minister of Culture.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL

C20 2011 Program Notes, Book 3 2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C21

Wednesday, July 20, 2011 GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL

Furioso (1947)Rolf Liebermann (1910-1999)Furioso is scored for pairs of woodwinds, four horns, three trumpets, three trom-bones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano and strings. The performance time is 9 minutes. This is the work’s first performance by the Grant Park Orchestra.

Rolf Liebermann was a trained conductor and a gifted composer, but some of his most important contributions to late-20th-century musical life were as an administrator. Liebermann was born in Zurich in 1910, and

from 1929 to 1933, he studied law at the city’s university and music with José Berr. After graduat-ing, Liebermann became a student of Hermann Scherchen, the eminent conductor and exponent of contemporary music who had just settled in Switzerland following the Nazis’ rise to power in his native Germany; Liebermann was Scherchen’s private secretary in 1937-1938 in Vienna, where Scherchen formed the Musica Viva Orchestra mainly from Jewish refugees exiled from Germany. Liebermann helped teach the refugees’ children during that difficult time, and he also wrote music criticism and began composing in a style influenced both by Schoenbergian serialism and French neo-classicism. He was stationed during the war at Ascona, where he studied with the expatriate Russian-German composer Vladimir Vogel. Liebermann joined the staff of Radio Zurich as a re-cording engineer in 1945, and five years later he was appointed director of the orchestra department of Swiss Radio; in 1957, he was named music director of North German Radio. In 1959, Lieber-mann became general manager of the Hamburg State Opera, which he made into one of the great theaters for modern opera during the fourteen years of his tenure, premiering 23 works (of which he commissioned 21) and presenting new productions of operas by Janácek, Britten, Berg and others. He worked a similar transformation at the Paris Opéra while serving as its director from 1973 to 1980. Liebermann was director of the International Summer Academy of the Salzburg Mozarteum from 1983 to 1987, and he returned to manage the Hamburg Opera from 1985 to 1988. He pub-lished his autobiography in English in 1987 as Opera Years. Among Liebermann’s many distinctions were the Commandeur de l’Ordre de la Légion d’honneur, honorary doctorates from Berne University and the University of Washington/Spokane, an honorary professorship from the Hamburg Senate, membership in the fine arts academies of Berlin and Hamburg, and honorary memberships in the Salzburg Mozarteum and the Royal Society of Arts, London. He died in Paris in 1999.

Liebermann’s career as a composer bracketed his administrative life. He composed actively thor-ough the mid-1950s, creating four operas, numerous vocal works and several orchestral and cham-ber pieces, most notably the Concerto for Jazz Band and Symphony Orchestra (1954), an attempt to combine popular and twelve-tone idioms. He resumed composing in the 1980s, completing three more operas (including the “multimedia jazz opera” Cosmopolitan Greetings, with text by Allen Ginsberg and set and direction by Robert Wilson), a piano concerto and a two pieces for cello. The title of Furioso, composed in 1947 and introduced by Liebermann’s mentor, Hermann Scherchen, at the Darmstadt Summer Contemporary Music Festival on July 27, 1947, indicates the work’s dominant character, to which a slow, lyrical central section provides an expressive and formal foil.

Le Tombeau de Couperin (1917, ORCheSTRATeD 1920)Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)Le Tombeau de Couperin is scored for pairs of woodwinds plus piccolo and English horn, two horns, trumpet, harp and strings. The performance time is 17 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed the work on August 10, 1977, with John Nelson conducting.

Ravel was tormented by the First World War. He was accepted into the armed forces despite his small stature and delicate health, but his physical constitution was not robust enough to withstand the rigors of combat and he was quickly discharged for medical reasons.

Soon after he arrived home, his beloved mother lapsed into her final illness, and the shock of her death nearly prostrated him. His own failed health, his mental anguish over the war, and the loss of his mother kept him from doing much creative work during World War I. Le Tombeau de Couperin is his only important work of those difficult years.

The inspiration for Le Tombeau came from two obsessions that filled Ravel’s mind in 1917 — the sorrow caused by the war and the need to retain the sanity represented by the tradition of French culture. In the piano suite that was the first version of Le Tombeau, each of the movements was dedicated to one of six friends of the composer who had fallen on the battlefield, a musical memorial to his countrymen and, perhaps, to his late mother as well. In a similar way, composers of the French Baroque age, François Couperin (1668-1733) among them, paid tribute in music to recently deceased colleagues. Such a piece was called a “tombeau,” literally a “tomb,” and Ravel intended such an association here. Beside just a way of eulogizing his comrades, however, the as-sociation with Couperin also represented for Ravel the continuity of the logic and refinement of French civilization. It was in this great Gallic tradition that Ravel sought intellectual and emotional shelter from crushing contemporary events. The title of Le Tombeau de Couperin, therefore, has a triple meaning: it is a memorial to family and close friends; it is a revival of some aspects of the musical style of the French Baroque; and, probably most significant for Ravel, it is a continuation of the venerable tradition of French culture and thought in a time of despair and nihilism.

Despite its heavy burden of associations, Le Tombeau de Couperin displays little of Ravel’s dis-traught mental state, especially in its effervescent orchestral version. Rather than a roiling, emo-tional document, Le Tombeau is a vision of the refined and elegant world of Versailles shimmering in retrospect through the medium of the dance, its most characteristic social manifestation. The suc-culently atmospheric orchestration and rich harmony clearly mark the modern origin of the work, but its buoyant rhythms and crystalline structure show the influence of the music of Couperin’s age. “This suite is a garland of musical flowers,” wrote Donald N. Ferguson, “grown from 17th-century seed in a 20th-century hothouse.”

The gossamer Prélude contains some dazzling passages for the woodwinds led by the oboe. The Forlane is based on a dance of Italian origin popular among the Venetian gondoliers before it crossed the Alps into France. The Menuet is the most durable of all Baroque dances. The Rigaudon is a vigorous duple-meter dance that originated in Provence.

SYMPhONY NO. 2 IN C MAJOR, OP. 61 (1845-1846)Robert Schumann (1810-1856)Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 is scored for pairs of woodwinds, two horns, two trumpets, three trombones, timpani and strings. The performance time is 38 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this Symphony on July 9, 1953, with Walter Hendl conducting.

The years 1845 and 1846 were difficult ones for Schumann. In 1844 he had gone on a concert tour of Russia with his wife, Clara, one of the greatest pianists of the era, and he was frustrated and humiliated at being recognized only as the husband of the featured performer and not in his own right as a distinguished composer and critic. The couple’s return to Leipzig found Robert nervous, depressed and suffering from occasional lapses of memory. He had a complete breakdown soon after, and his doctor advised the Schumanns to return to the quieter atmosphere of Dresden, where Robert had known happy times earlier in his life. They moved in October 1844, and Schumann recovered enough to completely sketch the Second Symphony in December of the following year. He began the orchestration in February, but many times found it impossible to work and could not finish the score until October.

Clara noted that her husband went night after night without sleep, arising in tears in the morn-ing. His doctor described further symptoms: “So soon as he busied himself with intellectual mat-ters, he was seized with fits of trembling, fatigue, coldness of the feet, and a state of mental distress

GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Wednesday, July 20, 2011

2011 Program Notes, Book 3 C23C22 2011 Program Notes, Book 3

culminating in a strange terror of death, which manifested itself in the fear inspired in him by heights, by rooms on an upper story, by all metal objects, even keys, and by medicines, and the fear of being poisoned.” Schumann complained of continual ringing and roaring in his ears, and it was at times even painful for him to hear music. He was almost frantic for fear of losing his mind. His physical symptoms, he was convinced, were a direct result of his mental afflictions. He was wrong.

In a 1971 article in The Musical Times, Eric Sams investigated Schumann’s illness, and his findings are both convincing and revealing. In those pre-antibiotic times, a common treatment for syphilis was a small dose of liquid mercury. The mercury relieved the external signs of the disease — but at the cost of poisoning the patient (victim?). Schumann, many years before his devoted mar-riage to Clara, had both the infection and the treatment. The problems he lamented — ringing ears, cold extremities, depression, sleeplessness, nerve damage — were the result of mercury poisoning. Sensitive as he was, Schumann first imagined and then was truly afflicted with his other symptoms until he became ill in both mind and body. It was, however, an insidious physical problem that led to his psychological woes rather than the other way around, as he believed.

Seen against this background of pathetic suffering, Schumann’s Second Symphony emerges as a miracle of the human spirit over the most trying circumstances. In his own words, “I was in bad shape physically when I began the work, and was afraid my semi-invalid state could be detected in the music. However, I began to feel more myself when I finished the whole work.” Of the philo-sophical basis of the Symphony, undoubtedly related to Schumann’s emotional state, Mosco Carner wrote, “The emotional drama in this Symphony leads from the fierce struggle with sinister forces (first movement) to triumphant victory (finale), while the intervening stages are febrile restlessness (scherzo) and profound melancholy (adagio).” This progression from darkness to light as a musi-cal process had its noble precedents in the Fifth and Ninth Symphonies of Beethoven, a musician whom Schumann revered, and it is probable that Schumann envisioned the construction of his Second Symphony as a mirror of his return to health during its composition.

This Symphony is the most formally traditional of the four that Schumann wrote. It com-prises four independent movements closely allied to Classical models. The sonata-allegro of the first movement is prefaced by a slow introduction which presents a majestic, fanfare-like theme in the brass and a sinuous, legato melody in the strings. (The brass theme recurs several times during the course of the work and serves as a motto linking this first movement with later ones.) The tempo quickens to begin the exposition, with the main theme heard in jagged, dotted rhythms. The second theme continues the mood of the main theme to complete the short exposition. The lengthy devel-opment section is mostly based on the second theme. The recapitulation employs a rich orchestral palette to heighten the return of the exposition’s themes, with the fanfare-motto heard briefly in the coda to conclude the movement.

The scherzo (“Schumann’s happiest essay in this form,” according to Robert Schauffler) has two trios: the first dominated by triplet rhythms in the woodwinds, the second by a legato chorale for strings. The horns and trumpets intone the motto theme at the end of the movement. The wonder-ful third movement is constructed around a nostalgic melody, one of Schumann’s greatest inspira-tions, first presented by the violins. A brief, pedantic contrapuntal exercise acts as a middle section, after which the lovely theme returns. The brilliant and vigorous finale is cast in sonata-allegro form, with a second theme derived from the opening notes of the melody of the preceding adagio. The majestic coda begins with a soft restatement of the motto theme by trumpets and trombone, and gradually blossoms into a heroic hymn of victory in the full brass choir. It is a grand conclusion to a work which displays, in Philip Spitta’s ringing phrases, “grave and mature depth of feeling, bold decisiveness of form and overpowering wealth of expression.”

©2011 Dr. Richard E. Rodda

GRANT PARK MUSIC FESTIVAL Wednesday, July 20, 2011

GrantParkMusicFestivalSeventy-seventh Season

Grant Park Orchestra and ChorusCarlos Kalmar, Artistic Director and Principal Conductor

Christopher Bell, Chorus Director

Choral Masterpieces: Bernstein & FauréFriday, July 22, 2011 at 6:30 p.m. Saturday, July 23, 2011 at 7:30 p.m. Jay Pritzker PavilionGRANT PARK ORCHESTRA AND CHORUSChristopher Bell, ConductorRyan Belongie, Counter-TenorLindsay Metzger, SopranoKeven Keys, Baritone

BERNSTEIN Chichester Psalms for Chorus, Counter-Tenor and Orchestra Psalm 108, vs. 2 (Maestoso ma energico) — Psalm 100 (Allegro molto) Psalm 23 (Andante con moto, ma tranquillo) — Psalm 2, vs. 1-4 (Allegro feroce) — Meno come prima Prelude (Sostenuto molto) — Psalm 131 (Peacefully flowing) — Psalm 133, vs. 1 (Lento possibile)

Ryan Belongie

J.S. BACH Vergnügte Ruh, beliebte Seelenlust, Cantata for Counter-Tenor, Oboe d’amore, Strings, Organ and Continuo, BWV 170 Aria: Vergnügte Ruh Recitative: Die Welt, das Sündenhaus Aria: Wie jammern mich doch die verkehrten Herzen Recitative: Wer sollte sich demnach Aria: Mir ekelt mehr zu leben

Ryan Belongie

FAURÉ Requiem for Soprano, Baritone, Chorus and Orchestra, Op. 48 Introit et Kyrie (Requiem aeternam): Molto largo — Andante moderato (Chorus) Offertoire (O Domine Jesu Christe): Adagio molto — Andante moderato — Adagio molto (Chorus and Baritone) Sanctus: Andante moderato (Chorus) Pie Jesu: Adagio (Soprano) Agnus Dei: Andante (Chorus) Libera me: Moderato — Più mosso — Moderato (Baritone and Chorus) In Paradisum: Andante moderato (Chorus)

Lindsay Metzger, Keven Keys